What they do to your traffic
Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords using Search Console data and found that a page ranking first for a keyword with an AI Overview had a 34.5% lower click-through rate than a comparable keyword without one. The position did not move. The clicks did.
This is why impression-based reporting misleads so badly in 2026. Impressions can climb while sessions fall, and a dashboard that only tracks the first number will read that as growth.
| Featured snippet | AI Overview | AI Mode | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sources shown | One | Several, with citation links | Many, across a conversation |
| Content | Lifted verbatim | Generated summary | Generated, refined by follow-ups |
| Effect on clicks | Reduced | Reduced further | Reduced most |
| How to influence | Rank first, answer plainly | Answer-first passages plus authority | Freshness and entity clarity |
How to be one of the cited sources
AI Overviews cite a handful of pages per query, and the pattern is consistent enough to work with. Definitional and comparison queries pull from pages that state the answer plainly in the first sentence under a heading that matches the question.
- Answer in the first 40 to 60 words of a section, before any context
- Use the question as the heading, in the words people actually use
- Keep passages self-contained, so a section can be lifted and still make sense
- Use real HTML tables where the subject has dimensions to compare
- Publish a visible last-updated date and keep it honest
What not to bother with
There is no markup that opts a page into an AI Overview and no schema type that requests one. Google published an official guide to optimising for its generative features in 2026, and its advice reduces to the same technical and editorial fundamentals rather than a new tag to add.
Why it matters for B2B marketing teams
This is where impression-based reporting starts lying to marketing teams. A dashboard showing rising impressions and flat sessions reads as progress when it is often the opposite. Report exposure and outcome as separate numbers, or you will defend a budget with a metric that no longer describes anything.